The Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha died on Sunday at the age of 92 years old, following a battle with lung cancer. Credited for modernising the built landscape of Brazil and inspiring a generation of future architects, Mendes da Rocha achieved late international renown despite working almost exclusively in São Paulo.
Mendes da Rocha graduated from the Mackenzie Presbyterian University College of Architecture in 1954, and soon established a reputation for his work on residential buildings in São Paulo, constructed cheaply and quickly with sympathy for their surrounds in large slabs of raw concrete.
His first major commission opened in 1958. The Club Athletico Paulistano Gymnasium, constructed in reinforced concrete and steel with a seating capacity of 2,000, cut a swathe through the sky with its hovering form and coiled intentionality. The circular roof is supported by six concrete blades and twelve steel cables, giving the stadium a futuristic appeal while the ground level opens out to greet the tennis courts and greenery of the surrounding plaza. At the São Paulo Biennial of 1961, Mendes da Rocha received the Grand Prize for the project.
The same year, Mendes da Rocha became a professor at the architecture and urbanism college of the University of São Paulo, now known as FAUUSP. Following the military coup of 1964, he was eventually forced from his position, although he still won the competition to design the Brazilian Pavilion at Expo ’70 in Osaka, one of the few times he would exhibit outside of his home country.
The coup had a chilling effect on his architectural practice. In 1975 he designed the Estádio Serra Dourada in Goiás, but it was the eighties before he became active again in the public life of São Paulo. He resumed teaching at FAUUSP, and in 1987 designed the Saint Peter Chapel and the Forma Furniture showroom in São Paulo, the following year beginning a decade of work on the Brazilian Museum of Sculpture.
The bulky forms, primary shapes, and exposed concrete which characterised so much of Paulo Mendes da Rocha’s work led many critics to define his method as a Brazilian form of Brutalism. In a brilliantly combative interview with El País in 2018, Mendes da Rocha rejected the term, too vague for the delicacy and poetry of his architecture. Raised platforms, skylights, and lofty panels of glass reach out in harmony with the surrounding nature.
In 2001, Mendes da Rocha received a Mies van der Rohe Award for his restoration of the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, the oldest art museum in the city. In 2006 he received the Pritzker Prize, awarded annually for ‘consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture’, capping his international reputation.
In 2015 he completed the National Coaches Museum in Lisbon, one of his rare forays abroad, but Mendes da Rocha still found the connection with his native Brazil, citing the ships which set sail and wound up discovering his home country. In 2016 he was honoured at the Venice Biennale with a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, and received the Praemium Imperiale Award. Then in 2017 his body of work received a RIBA Gold Medal.
